Adam Nevill - House of Small Shadows

It was as if her movements had been anticipated.

Maude had even stolen her shoes, because Edith wouldn’t let her leave. Beneath the soles of her bare feet, the stones dug deep and made her shift her position. And now that her unprotected feet were moving across the ground, she knew there was little chance of her reaching the nearest A road. She could barely even see her feet, let alone road signs.

Above her, the great canopy of black sky featured an array of stars unobscured by cloud. And for a moment she stared upwards at the heavens and felt she could have been on a mountain summit, surrounded by thin air.

The black eternity resembled a night sky she had once seen in Northern Spain, one immediately unfamiliar and too vast. A sky that frightened her with the sense of belittlement that comes swiftly downwards in a sudden awareness that one stood insignificant, nullified by an infinite surrounding void.

As she had done in her room during her first night, Catherine looked away from the sky before the realization became too complete.

She dithered beside her car, nervously watching the village from a distance. Just getting out of the car had taken all of her willpower.

Currents of cold air pressed through the thin white dress that had been laid out for her. She shivered while her thoughts scratched about for an escape route. Because that was what she had been reduced to, escape. The nightmare she had stumbled into at Green Willow, when she stood amongst the dolls in the room of a scruffy guest house, would not end.

Without an alternative, Catherine climbed over the pole and entered the village.

The first heads she saw were crowned with large hats. Little more of the figures was visible. The people would veer close to the lit windows, then shuffle away.

She wanted to believe the crowd moved about refreshments and concessions on the narrow pavements. But the motion of the throng also suggested some kind of dance was being performed, as the movement of the half-lit shapes seemed to replicate itself in a pattern.

The poor light, combined with her fragile senses, may have warped her perspective too, because the people seemed too small to be adults. Children? The harder she stared, the energy of the assembly also struck her as similar to that of excitable toddlers released from houses to play outdoors.

She wished she were not wearing white. A desire that grew with every step deeper inside the village. And where would Edith, Maude, Mike and Tara be, the only guests she could count upon as being familiar? The sole buildings representing any kind of communal area were the Sea Scout hall and the church.

A desire to sneak to the far side of the village, and then keep on creeping for as long as her bare feet lasted, felt urgent enough to be desperate. But she had to find Mike. If her suspicions about the Masons’ legacy of abduction were true, then Mike needed to be warned. Tara could go to hell.

Would she get past pain and rage if she saw Mike? She would have to, because Mike had come here in a car; Tara’s car, because Mike couldn’t drive. To get out she had to find Mike and the bitch he had come here with. Tara’s car must be parked on the road that ran into Magbar Wood from the other end of the village high street.

She told herself, then reminded herself, that Edith and Maude were hardly threatening, physically, as long as she didn’t swallow anything they gave her. But were the two elderly women working alone? This is what she needed to know. She thought of the thin bee-keeper beckoning to her from the garden as she stood at the window. And were they still using a child?

But what happened to the children of the Red House when they grew up?

She needed to get far enough away to pick up a phone signal to call the police. Her story would be preposterous, but then so was the household she was trying to flee. Whatever had happened at the Red House in the past, it was up to the authorities now to fathom out.

The sparse crowd withdrew at her passage inside the village. She offered a nervous smile to the vague covered heads of what she was now sure were elderly adults. She had encountered at least one here before. Children wouldn’t be out so late, unaccompanied by adults. All of the people were small because they must be wizened by age. Though the two capering figures that passed a lit window to her left, as if keeping pace with her, made her anxious. Their antics, even in darkness, suggested something unsupervised and out of control. Her attempt at a friendly smile ached like the rictus of an insincere grin maintained before a bad joke.

At the intersection of the two lanes she looked to the church and scout hall, but could see no further than the last residential buildings in the second lane. When she looked at the houses, only glimmers of flat dirty stone and coppery light behind calcified nets was visible. Inside the open doorways there was darkness.

Two women tottered past her and were either veiled, masked, or had painted their obscured faces. Because faces could not be so pale without embellishment.

The efforts at masking failed to conjure any sense of romance, or the illicit behaviour associated with masquerades. What the women’s outfits did inspire was a deep uneasiness about the intent and purpose of the tradition being celebrated within the miserable village. Thoughts of Violet Mason’s bony face, half concealed behind netting, were inevitable but unwelcome.

Unless you are one of them you cannot know them.

But what could these frail old things do to her even if they wished her harm?

Moving past the intersection and towards the far side of the main lane, her vision jumped and flitted as she searched for Mike. But if she wasn’t mistaken, her progress was now being thwarted by changes in direction from the stooped-over figures moving closer to the house fronts.

The people who slowed her progress appeared to hobble across her path, as if wearing shoes that were too tight on their hidden feet. An observation she soon heard, and occasionally saw, augmented by the rapid patter of the metal tips of canes across tarmac and cement.

For one horrible moment she thought of herself as an animal being run to ground, incrementally worn out by the patient circling of a pack. Or were they just as equally fascinated by her, as she was by them?

There was nothing she could see to account for such agitation in the crowd either. Or was it excitement? No concessions, as she hoped, offered food or souvenirs on either side of the lane, so where were they all headed?

Under closer scrutiny, the energy of the crowd now struck her as being akin to the jostling she associated with festival crowds in the darkness of night, before a star attraction came on stage, suggesting all here were waiting for something that had not yet happened.

A woman whose footsteps Catherine tried to follow stepped into a brief wash of light to reveal a three-quarter-length cape and high Medici collar tied about her neck. The woman’s tiny head was concealed by a Pompadour dome of what must have been, at one time, someone else’s hair. It was now puffed out on an invisible wire frame and held in place by tortoiseshell combs, and what looked like long iron pins. Propped upon the elaborate wig was a little Juliet cap constructed from pearl beads.

On a sudden whim to ask who was authorized to remove the barrier pole so she could drive through the village, Catherine reached for the woman’s elbow.

The little woman altered her course and crossed the street. But not before Catherine had seen half of a deeply lined face beneath several layers of black netting. In the brassy light, the skin of the woman’s face was as white as a clown’s in full make-up.

Catherine turned round. Because the three figures whom she confronted with her shocked silence, also stopped moving at the same time as she did. She was sure they had been whispering.